Today, we’re unveiling BlueCheck. BlueCheck drives down the price of user credentials verification down to under a dollar - so that you can build powerful applications that are spam-free. We achieve this by leveraging the latest developments in AI and Cryptography. It’s time to update your old verification stack.

User Credentials are Siloed

Users are continuously building up their reputation digitally. Yet, we rely on physical verification of documents like driver license, university transcripts, and employment offer letters. That’s just so backward.

We’ve always had the problem of fake documents thanks to Photoshop. So, we had to continuously try and detect anomalies in fake edited documents. Now, that problem is even more aggravated because of AI. Now, everyone has access to professional counterfeiter. Document uploads is going to be, if not already, irrelevant. If it’s not cryptographically signed, like on services like Docusign - you must assume the contents of the document is fake.

So, how do we ensure data that the data that the user is submitting on your product is actually true?

For one class of data like that of employment and education background - you can contact a background verification company. These background verification companies collect data ethically or unethically from various sources. And when they don’t have the data you’re requesting, they resort to human intervention. This includes sending an email to the HR or actually calling them up.

All the data is already there on some system, it’s just not accessible to everyone. All the data is locked up in Silos. Even in situations where all the stakeholders want the data to be shared - there is no simple way to do it. Even though a university wants to provide the latest transcript for a student to be able to send to their hiring manager, the technology simply doesn’t exist. And that’s not true only for universities and their students’ transcripts - it’s true for almost any data on the internet.

The existence of these silos and technical debt is a major reason for the need for human intervention - and thereby the cost of performing such verifications.

So, what options do we have?

One is to replace the human in these verification companies with an AI. An AI can send emails, an AI can make phone calls. We know this perfectly well. However that would mean slapping a new technology to an outdated process.

Using state of the art technology to change the process

Over the last 5 years, significant improvements have been made in the world of AI and Cryptography. Using these advances, we can remove the dependence on the human all together. Not by replacing the human with an AI, but updating the process with new tools.

The key insight is all organizations today have a web portal of some form. Students have a university portal, employees use SaaS payroll solutions, everyone manages their banking digitally. So all the data is there on some database, because that’s the only way the website can show that information to the user when they login. Obviously.

If we are able to screenshot that information, we don’t need physical documents or a person calling up administrative offices around the world.

But the problem, like with a counterfeit document, is that a screenshot can be morphed just as easily.

The latest advancements in cryptography help us overcome this problem. Using a technique called zkTLS, one can generate an attested copy of the screenshot. Even if one pixel in this screenshot is modified, the entire document will be flagged as counterfeit. This doesn’t need any change from the website’s side. So, using the existing infrastructure - without the banks, universities, and SaaS tools having to update their technology, we can make data tamper-proof.

Bluecheck leverages these developments in cryptography to change the process of credential verification and replace it with something orders of magnitudes cheaper.

Additionally, in the last 12 months - AI has gotten so much better, that this cryptography coupled with AI enables us to verify a wider variety of credentials at a cheaper-than-ever costs.

Less than a Dollar?!

Since most of the verification providers use legacy solutions including collecting data from each organization via long term deals and use an onground sales force coupled with a customer support team - their costs of verifying simple credentials ranges from $10-$100.

That is outrageous costs for verifying what is practically a couple of sentences worth of information. “John Doe worked at Acme Corp” - imagine paying $100 for getting a verification for 6 words. That’s $18 per word.

That doesn’t make any sense at all. Just because it costs so much, there are so many applications that defer the verification to as late in the process as possible. Many times in hiring, for example, the document verification is done AFTER the candidate has passed all the interviews. A hiring manager views the time and effort spent in the interview process to be cheaper than verifying the candidate’s credentials!

Not only that, there are various applications that can’t even launch because it’s so expensive to verify credentials. A dating app that verifies users credentials? Too expensive. There’s no way a dating app can spend $100 on verifying the background of the user, when their ARPU is less than $20. Similarly with job marketplaces. It’s way too expensive to build job marketplaces where all the candidates are verified by default - because one cannot possibly spend $100 for each user that’s signing up.

With BlueCheck and by disrupting the process used to collect data — we can bring down costs to a few cents.

We are incredibly excited to work with you on how we can help you leverage these low cost user credential verifications for your enterprise. Hit us up.